Monday, Monday: A Novel (41 page)

“We got a mishap, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said. “That cow is not movin’. Emmett? Emmett Johnson? Are you out there?”

Emmett was already climbing over the rail. Madeline watched him stride into the arena and kneel to examine the cow. She saw him say something to one of the cowboys, who turned and shouted to the announcer, “She’s breathin’! She’ll probably come to!”

“Did you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? She is not movin’, but she is not dead. Maybe she got a little overexcited. Knocked herself out on the rail.”

Emmett looked over toward Madeline just as the cow lifted her head, her horn striking hard across Emmett’s brow and knocking his hat off. He stood and stumbled aside, pressing his palm to the wound as the cow rose sluggishly and trotted away.

The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have got another mishap. The cow’s fine, but Emmett’s took a pretty good lick in the head. We sure hope he’s all right.”

Several people gathered around Emmett. Madeline wondered if she should climb down into the arena and offer to help him. She looked around for Clay, but he had disappeared with Nicholas and Andy. An ambulance pulled in through a gate and two EMTs—a man and a woman—jumped out. The woman dabbed at Emmett’s forehead, trying to staunch the bleeding, but he took the gauze from her, pressed it to the wound, gave a cursory wave to the announcer, and started up the ramp from the arena.

“He’s all right,” the announcer said. “Just a little bang to the head.”

Emmett looked at Madeline as he headed toward the exit, the front of his shirt bloody. The female EMT trailed behind, insisting he give her a better look at the wound. When he stopped and pulled the gauze away, the blood ran down his face, and Madeline hurried over to see if she could help. “Get that ambulance out of here,” she heard him tell the EMT.

“This could be a serious head injury,” the woman said.

“It is not a serious head injury.” He sounded peeved and disgusted. “It’s a cut on my eyebrow. I just need to change my shirt.”

“We should put a butterfly on it at least,” she insisted.

“Then give me the butterfly.” He put his hand out.

“We should clean the wound first.”

“I can do that in my truck. Just give me the butterfly, Alice.”

Reluctantly, she dug a bandage out of her medical case and handed it over to Emmett.

Madeline followed Emmett outside, where a hard wind blew dust around the parked vehicles and agitated the penned animals. Horses paced and whinnied, and cattle bawled, jamming themselves together. The lights in the parking area had turned a lurid red in the blowing dust.

Emmett turned and waited for her.

“Are you all right?” she asked, raising her voice over the wind.

“Hell of a stupid thing to do,” he said irritably.

“How deep do you think it is?” she asked.

“Not deep. Of all the goddamn things. Come with me to my truck.” He peeled the bandage out of its wrapper, shoving it on his forehead as he walked.

“You can’t put it on like that,” she told him. “You need some antibiotic ointment.”

“I just need to stop this bleeding. Shit.”

“Are you light-headed?”

“No.” He stopped walking. “But where the hell is my truck?” He squinted at the rows of school campers and jacked-up pickups. “This way.”

The grit irritated her eyes. She could taste it. It stung her skin.

“I felt that cow move,” he said. “I don’t know why the hell I didn’t get out of the way. I just…” He shook his head. “I think I was looking at you.” He turned and looked at her briefly again, the bandage plastered across his brow soaked with blood already.

“How long is this dust going to last?” she asked him.

“Awhile.”

At the truck, he opened one of the hinged doors of the vet box in the bed and pulled out a Ziploc bag of first-aid supplies. Yanking the bandage off his forehead, he got behind the wheel and looked at himself in the rearview mirror, dabbing at the cut. Madeline climbed in on the passenger side, relieved to close herself away from the wind. She tried to help Emmett, but he wouldn’t allow her to look at the wound up close.

“I’m not going to hear the end of this,” he grumbled. “Not in Alpine. I’ll be a laughingstock.” Pressing a wad of gauze over the cut, he started taping it down. “There’s a clean shirt, back in the box. Would you mind getting it for me?” He was having trouble making the tape stick over the dust. “It’s in the front compartment on top of the refrigerator.”

She got out, shielding her eyes. Her hair had come loose from the ponytail. It whipped around her face. When she lifted the lid of the vet box a light came on, shining on ropes and halters that hung from hooks, a jumble of buckets and tubes, a pair of rubber boots, and a small refrigerator. Taped on the underside of the lid, beside Emmett’s medical license, was a Gary Larson cartoon about a veterinarian and a handwritten note that said, “Mel owes fifty dollars.” An astringent medicinal smell was strong in spite of the wind.

Madeline grabbed a T-shirt from a stack and got back in the truck and gave it to Emmett. He already had the bloody one off and was rolling it up and stuffing it under the seat. She tried not to stare at his naked chest as he pulled the clean shirt on.

“Now all I need is my hat,” he said. “Damn it, where’s that?”

“It fell off in the arena. Do you want me to go look for it?”

“Somebody’ll get it for me.” He settled back against the door, and she saw that his eye was discolored and starting to swell. “Just stay with me for a minute. Talk to me. Would you?” Reaching across the seat, he took hold of her hand and rubbed his calloused thumb over her knuckles. They sat for a minute like that. She knew she should pull her hand away and fight the wind to go back inside, but then she would never have this illicit excitement again. The best she would be able to do was patch up a problematic relationship with her unfaithful husband.

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked him.

“How’s the dog doing?”

“We already talked about that.”

“How are you doing, yourself?” he asked.

“Fine. Hating this wind. Wishing I hadn’t told you about Andy fooling around.”

“You ought to forgive him for that,” Emmett remarked. “Everyone screws up sooner or later. One way or another.”

“I haven’t,” she said.

“Oh?” He looked amused.

Not yet, she hadn’t. She studied his bandaged forehead in the darkness. “Does that hurt?”

“Like the dickens.”

She twined her fingers into his hand and felt heedless, closed in the truck this way, with the wind hurling dust at the windows. Maybe Emmett was right: No one was perfect. People were meant to muddle their way through marriage.

Emmett slid his thumb back and forth over her knuckles while she stared at the dashboard and listened to the rumbling approach of another train. She wiped at the dust on her face and tried to gather the courage to move close enough to put her hand on Emmett’s leg. The silence between them had started to feel demanding. She almost spoke, but didn’t. Emmett’s gaze suddenly shifted away from her face, and she turned and saw Andy knocking on her window, looking in from the brown haze, holding the cowboy hat beside his head to shield his face from the blowing dust.

Emmett released her hand, and Madeline opened the door slightly. “Hey, hi,” she shouted over the piercing wail of the train’s whistle.

“Hi,” Andy shouted back.

“What’s up?” she asked as the whistle faded, replaced by the din of the train moving along the tracks and the loud moaning of the wind.

“I was looking for you.” He had a puzzled expression.

“Where’s Nicholas? I thought you were watching him.”

“He’s with Clay. The lariat guys said they’d keep an eye on him. I saw you leave—”

“Emmett needed to change his shirt. Did you see what happened?”

“I did.” He looked at Emmett suspiciously. “Are you all right?” he yelled to him over the noise.

“I am now.”

Madeline climbed out of the truck. “I’m going to go find Nicholas,” she told Emmett. “I’ll see you inside.”

But she wasn’t sure if she would see him inside. Before closing the door of the truck she looked at him, the bandage stuck to his head. She suddenly hoped she would never see him again.

Andy tried to use his hat to screen her from the wind as they walked toward the arena. “What were you doing?” he asked over the train’s departing shriek.

“I helped him put on a bandage.”

“Is anything wrong?” He had to yell to be heard.

“No.”

“You were gone a long time. You were helping him out?”

She shrugged and kept walking.

Inside, teams of men were wrestling calves to the ground and pulling boxer shorts onto their hind legs. Andy and Madeline found Nicholas coming back from the bucking chutes. “We need to go,” Madeline told him.

He started to argue with her, but the announcer’s voice thundered over the loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have got a dust storm coming our way. The National Weather Service just issued a high wind warning. As much as we hate to disappoint all you folks who have come out to support our cowboys, we’re going to have to shut down. We got a lot of animals to secure in this situation. You’re welcome to stay here if you want to, but as you can see, we are not exactly airtight. I think it’s time for all of us to head home.”

People started to rise from the stands and file toward the exits. Andy helped Nicholas pull his shirt collar up over his mouth.

“Drive slow,” the announcer said. “You old folks with breathing trouble like me keep your mouths shut and covered. Not a easy task when you like to talk, I know.”

Tucking Nicholas between them, Madeline and Andy made their way with the crowds. People moved in groups, burying their faces into the backs of strangers for protection from the flying dust as they sought their cars. Vehicles in the parking lot appeared and vanished in heavy squalls. The lights overhead were dim orbs.

By the time they reached the Suburban, Nicholas was sputtering and near tears, complaining about the dirt in his eyes and saying he couldn’t breathe. Madeline gave the keys to Andy and hurried Nicholas into the backseat. She climbed into the passenger seat and dug from under it a half-consumed bottle of water she had bought on the drive from Austin. Pouring it into her palms, she dabbed at Nicholas’s eyes from over the seat. “Don’t rub!” she told him.

“You’re making it worse!” he wailed. “I can’t see!”

The traffic moved slowly, bumper-to-bumper. The headlights of oncoming traffic looked as red as taillights, and it was hard to see the road and make out which way cars were moving. For half an hour, they crept along. The grimy air was so thick in some places their headlights seemed to be shining into a hill of dirt. Nicholas, in the backseat, exaggerated his cough. Madeline told him to stop it. Her cell phone rang.

“Honey?” It was her mom. “Are you all right?”

“We’re on the way home.”

“You’re driving home?”

“Of course we’re driving.”

“Where are you?”

“Not sure. I can’t see much past the road.”

“Oh sweetie, you should pull over.”

Madeline heard Jack’s voice in the background and some discussion between him and her mother. “Jack says if you can’t see the road, you should pull over,” her mother finally said.

“We’re at a snail’s pace, Mom. There’s a lot of traffic. Nobody’s pulling over.”

“Oh honey, be careful.” She had more discussion with Jack. “Jack says if you have to pull over, you need to turn your lights off so they won’t confuse other traffic about where the road is. And set your parking brake.”

“Mom, we’re not pulling over. We’re following the other cars.”

It was as if they were traveling on a planet far from earth, the particles of a hostile landscape blown by terrific winds. Closed in here with Andy and Nicholas, and with the portrait of her mother in the back, she couldn’t believe she had sat in Emmett Johnson’s truck and held his hand. How sad and pathetic. How desperate to try to cheer herself up like that, to sit in a truck outside a rodeo with a man she barely knew. There was a vast difference between the intimacy she longed for and the clumsy, meaningless circumstance in which she had put herself. She didn’t feel wrong to have treated Andy this way—his betrayal had been much worse. But she didn’t feel like the person she had thought she was.

When Andy pulled into the drive, the lights inside the house looked gloomy. Madeline put her arm around Nicholas and ran with him to the porch, Andy running behind them. Shelly flung the door open for them. Breathing hard, coughing, Madeline saw herself in the mirror over the hall table. The dust covering her was darker than her skin and lighter than her hair, so that she looked monochromatic, with only her eyes retaining their usual color. “That was the weirdest drive!” she said. “Look at us.”

She expected her mother to be relieved to see them, but instead Shelly looked somber. “I’m so glad you’re home safely.”

“Is something wrong?” Madeline asked.

Nicholas stood on tiptoe to see as much of himself as possible in the mirror. “Look how white my teeth are!” He grinned at himself. “And look at my eyes!”

“Mom?” Madeline asked. “Where is everybody? Is everyone okay?”

“Yes, everyone’s okay. But I need to talk with you.”

Andy said, “Upstairs, son. Into the shower.”

“But look at my eyes!”

Andy ushered him upstairs.

“Do you want to rinse your face off, first, honey?” Shelly asked Madeline.

“No, I just want to know what’s wrong.”

“We can talk in the parlor.”

It was dark in there. Her mother sat down in a high-backed chair.

Madeline flipped the switch by the door, flooding the room with light.

“If you don’t mind, leave it off,” Shelly said. “It seems so bright.”

In the instant before the room went dark, Shelly saw Madeline with striking clarity: her hand on the switch, her dusty, darkened face, her perplexed look. She fought the urge to stand and warn her out of the room and away from this moment of truth.

Then Madeline turned the light off.

“Sit down,” Shelly said.

She sat on a sofa across from Shelly.